Dido and Aeneas: the Puppet Version

A two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old love story (based on a story from Virgils Aeneid), allied with 350-year-old music composed by musical genius Henry Purcell and a libretto written by the English poet laureate Nahum Tate and, of course, for these performances only, a lively bunch of contemporary puppets! Dido and Aeneas was one of the very first operas to be written in English, whose first public performance was in 1688 at a private girls school in the (then-) village of Chelsea.

While the six instrumentalists (five strings plus harpsichord) and six voices from the Postmodern Camerata, led by guest musical director Dr Charles Barber (Artistic Director of City Opera Vancouver), present the music in all its baroque splendour, three puppeteers and thirty puppets (the latter ranging in size from six inches to six feet) bring to life the characters in this timeless tale of love gone wrong: a queen desperate for a new chance at joy, a hero washed up on a foreign shore but under direction of the Gods, a sorceress and two evil witches, some very fickle sailors, and a blooded wild beast …